A sample and hold circuit is used in a variety of applications such as oscilloscopes, analog demodulators, gesture recognition, and the like. A basic function that the sample and hold circuit performs is to facilitate set triggers in oscilloscopes, perform data demodulation or set demodulation bias levels in radio receivers, store last recorded gestures, etc.
The sample and hold circuit is also used in a successive approximation analog-to-digital converter which is a type of analog-to-digital converter that converts a continuous analog waveform to a discrete digital representation via a binary search.